Olivia Lee Stogner is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest
Where Horses Grow Tired of Running, Hadeel’s Story
Today I went to fill up drinking water.
My children are doing well.here. They are children
who do not know what is going on around them.Dalia is only one month old.
I walked a kilometer to reach the water place.
It is not your fault. We are believers.
We cannot change reality. This is beyond our capabilities.W
We cannot say no to America, Europe, or Israel.
There are superpowers and we have been oppressed–
and an oppressed people– for hundreds of years.
The truth is that I own a land
where horses grow tired of running,
because it is so big and spacious.
I inherited from my grandfather
the identification paper regarding
our land that they occupied in 1948.
It is a trust around my neck that I must protect.
Today, I live in a 4 x 4 tent.
This is not fiction. i have the papers in my grandfather’s name,
from the British Mandate government in Palestine
before 1948 I am crying now; this is great injustice.
The paper in my hand is more than100 years old.
It is very old but not crumbling.A paper recognizing
that the land belongs to my grandfather, and belongs to my father
and belongs to me, and belongs to my daughters.
One day I will return to the land
where horses grow tired of running–
because it is so big and spacious.
One day I will return to the land
the land which has birthed me–
the land which cradles my soul.
Already there I hear the laughter
of y daughters’ footfalls,
the striking of stones of my fathers’s stride
the quiet of my grandfather’s endless walking
as he stops to greet me
and the thunderous joy of the racing of hoses
who will one day grow tired
because the land is so big,
because the land is so spacious
because it cradles as a mother
all who need love.




Share this post with your friends.



Wonderful poems…great way to begin this day…Allegra